According to everyone ever everywhere, it’s going to be a HUGE CATASTROPHE if we [insert voting habits here]. I actually quite agree, but only because I think everything is already a HUGE CATASTROPHE and am worried that no one has noticed. When you think about it, it almost doesn’t matter because the fossil fuels are running out and in 50 years, we’ll be burning underfunded care homes to keep warm anyway, and living in disused hospitals decimated by the conservatives because of the housing shortage the immigrants we didn’t let in definitely caused.

Debacle Debate 1.

I don’t want to talk about the first debate because Farage was in it and the oily nationalism of someone who thinks we can close our borders and everything will be better makes me feel the same desolate certainty that the gods hate you as when your biscuit falls into your tea mid-dunk. It was an hour of Farage talking over Julie Etchingham and her apologising and British people wanting something they may or may not be able to spell. “Yeah but if we stay, is we still sovereign though?”
No, astonishingly we can’t override all those other nations we agreed to work in a team with because there’s no ‘massive wanker’ in t-e-a-m.

I think my favourite element of this debate was the frequent use of the word ‘whopper’ and the bit about leprechauns, which certainly livened everything up. My problem with the 350 million per week scandal is not that a politician put a mega lie on his bus (did anyone seriously think any figures mentioned were not going to be displayed to advantage with rebates/other statistics left out?), because that’s frankly not a surprise, I’m more surprised BJ has a bus actually, but rather the fact that people seem to believe the Tories intend to invest that money into the NHS. I teach English and I know when Boris uses a conditional like ‘we could use some of that money for the NHS’, he’s expressing a hypothetical ability, not something he’s actually intending on doing. Clever. Perhaps inside his head he’s holding hands with that leprechaun, dancing a jig on his whopper bus in the nude, singing, ‘but I won’t but I won’t but I won’tywon’tywon’t’, who can tell?
I mean, they can tell us that’s what they’re going to do…but if they don’t, what can we do about it? Vote them out? Unlikely, with first past the post, where stuff like this happened in 2015:

The attitudes of both sides became a little clearer for me. Nicola Sturgeon expressed my understanding of the EU – a group of independent countries agreeing to work together to guarantee freedom of movement, so people have the choice to work where their skills are needed. Or like me, if you fancy working somewhere German speaking because that’s what you’re good at. This freedom of movement is the only good thing in a world (still) controlled by capitalism, where money is the only thing not ruled by borders.

Yeah it’s not perfect, but the UK isn’t perfect either. And I don’t know if anyone’s noticed but the Empire is over. We’re not a massive world power people should be bowing and scraping to. We’re a wee country with a shaky economy and I’m for working together to work it out. If you pull out of the EU and destabilise the market and it collapses, what chance do we have of improved trading then?

I also really don’t like the Brexit attitude at all. It’s an attitude that would fly absolutely nowhere else. Something in your life is shit? Abandon it. Don’t even try to improve it, just drop it straight away. I mean, that’s definitely what I’ll be telling my children. As much as I’m loath to agree with Cameron on anything (remain, not anything else), his entire perspective towards the EU is currently, ‘let’s have less risk, put less in and get more out.’ Another excellent life lesson I’ll be sure to pass on to the dear children, who are suddenly so important.

Immigreation*

Leave: Immigrants are bad and wreck everything the Tories have so carefully funded and built up. They also irreversibly push down wages because employers in the UK are genetically unable to pay the minimum wage if they can see a way to scam more money somehow. That says far more about our attitude to work, dignity and worth than it does about immigrants.

BJ then purports to be outraged at the democratic deficit in the EU, which we certainly don’t have in a country with an unelected House of Lords (other bicameral gems include Belize, Lesotho, Madagascar, Oman, Russia and Saudi Arabia) and he’s blatantly ignoring the fact that if every single person in Scotland voted to stay and 51% in Wales, England and Northern Ireland voted to leave, Scotland would have to leave as well. Or the other way around, if everyone in Wales voted remain and 51% of the other UK countries voted leave, Wales would have to leave. Is that democratic? I guess it’s a grey area and depends on how much you think the smaller UK countries should have sovereignty over their own affairs. I’m easy, I think if you’ve got a National Assembly/Parliament and your own language, then you should be listened to when your citizens make a decision in a referendum. If the smaller countries can be dragged out by the weight of England, what’s the point in them even voting?

E-definitely not a con-omy

Nope, no cons here, not in any’o our figures. This bit got a bit off topic and BJ was desperate to get in his Project Fear jibe, which I found quite disgusting. For the majority of the indyref campaign in Scotland, the YES side had to contend with a huge media bias and still managed almost half the vote. Not a single newspaper was in favour of independence for most of the campaign. The bias was even the topic of university research that the BBC responded to by sending an insulting email to the author’s boss before they tried, and failed, to take the research apart. For BJ to quote that back and claim the remain side are scaremongering on a similar level is out of context, childish and misplaced in the current debate.

The most telling comment from Gisela Stuart about the EU was when she said, ‘They need to sort out their problems.’ And that’s my issue with that statement. I am European, these are my problems, too.

Up next…I’ll tell you what it won’t be, me making snide comments about Boris’ scarecrow hair or overprivileged upbringing, where he was able to buy a better education than everyone else, because I am a grownup and therefore above all that.
NHS, workers’ rights and sovereignty coming next…